Economist.com Builds Its Pay Wall Higher, But All The New Stuff Stays Free
Economist.com is taking two steps to charge for more content…
—Already charging for articles older than 12 months, it’s extending the threshold to those over 90 days old.
—And it’s making the digital print edition replica accessible only to subscribers.
The press release calls this “experimentation with a new website pay wall”. But the magazine, which is proving especially resilient in print, is rejecting the opportunity to go entirely pay-for.
Website publisher Ben Edwards, in the release: “Our intention is to continue to develop intelligent discussion as a free, advertising-supported experience, but to charge for the weekly magazine online.”
“Through ‘This week’s print edition’, we offer readers an online experience of reading the magazine. We consider this to be a premium reading experience and plan to develop the online edition of our magazine for our most loyal and engaged readers: subscribers.
“We will continue to encourage both subscribers and non-subscribers to participate in the extraordinary discussions we host on http://www.economist.com, Facebook and elsewhere, catalysed by our breaking news commentary, our blogs and audio-visual content, and by our award-winning debates.”
The problem with this approach, however, is that those readers who value reading journals in print do so more than reading replicas of the same printed edition on a screen.
The same textual content from inside the magazine remains freely accessible on the website, albeit without the same layout treatment given to the dead tree.
Economist.com’s annual sub costs $79. The title had room to charge more. July-to-December mag sales rose rose 6.8 percent to 1.39 million copies and operating profits were 26 percent up to £56 million on 17 percent better revenue of £313 million.
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